Sunday, December 31, 2017

Staunton, December 30 – Over the
course of the last year, Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov continued to be identified as
spiritual advisor to Vladimir Putin, was identified as a competitor to
Patriarch Kirill and organizer of the Kirill Serebrennikov case, and now
appears to have made himself into “a Sechin in priestly robes,” according to
Zoya Svetova.

At first, he refused
but when Svetova said she wanted to talk about her mother, religious writer
Zoya Krakhmalnikov, who in 1983 was imprisoned and exiled for the publication of
her collection of religious writings in the West, he agreed. The two spoke ten
minutes about Zoya and an hour about everything else.(For the interview, see svoboda.org/a/28851429.html.)

According
to Svetova, Shevkunov grew up without a father and then after finishing school
in 1977 entered a training program to be a film maker.He visited various religious groups and was
attracted to Orthodoxy. He joined and was taken on by the Patriarchate to help
with making films for the millennium of Russian Orthodoxy in 1988.

From his
earliest years, friends recall that he had close relations with and may even
have been recruited by the KGB. In 1990, he published an article in Sovetskaya
Rossiya arguing that “a democratic state will always try to weaken the most
influential Church in the country by applying the ancient principle of ‘divide
and rule.’”

In August
1991 at the time of the coup, he became a hieromonk and in November 1993, Patriarch
Aleksii put Shevkunov in charge of the Sretensky monastery at the Lubyanka
because he and the organs wanted someone each side felt comfortable with.At that time, the new priest was known as a
passionate monarchist, his acquaintances recall.

Shevkunov
began talking about Putin when the latter was named prime minister and the
rumors that the two were close by virtue of background and views began to
spread.In 2003, Shevkunov rather than
the patriarch accompanied the Russian president to the US and helped him
promote the reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and
Moscow.

Since
then Shevkunov has become ever more important. He now is in charge of the commission
investigating the murder of the Imperial Family, where he has attracted attention
by talking about the possibility that the murders were some kind of Satanic “ritual.”He has confessed Putin and he oversaw the building
of a church in Putin’s Novo-Ogaryevo residence.

One of
his followers, Lina Starostina, recalls that “in one of his homilies, Father
Tikhon said that finally the Lord had given Russia a believer as president and
now it can build an Orthodox state. I understand now that his goal was an
Orthodox Taliban, an Orthodox empire” because the churchman has always been “a
man of ideas.”

Like many
prominent church leaders, Shevkunov has been actively involved in economic
affairs as well as publishing.Hi book, “Unholy
Saints,” has gone through 14 editions totally millions of copies and earned him
enormous sums. He says he has donated all of the earnings to the construction
of churches.

Svetova
spoke with many experts on the church about Shevkunov.Sergey Pugachev said that the bishop is now “afraid
of his own shadow” and that he believes that “the Westernizers wanat to destroy
our country … In general, he is like Igor Sechin, only in priestly robes.” And
he can be “very harsh” in dealing with those he views as below them or as his
enemies.

Journalist
Sergey Chaplin says that Shevkunov has become “the main interpreter of Russian
history” for the powers that be.Nikolay
Mitrokhin, a researcher on Orthodoxy, points out that Shevkunov did not become
bishop when one would have expected because many in the church still don’t like
those with ties in the organs.

But the
FSB people “like to have their own priest” and have helped him when they can,
the church researcher says.

Aleksandr
Soldatov, the editor of Credo.ru, agrees and suggests that Shevkunov was
consecrated bishop only on the insistence of the Presidential Administration. He sees a great future for Shevkunov even
though according to the rules of the church, the bishop hasn’t played all the
roles a patriarch is supposed to have.

But “if
it is necessary, the rules can be rewritten,” he says.

One
priest speaking on conditions of anonymity says that “Shevkunov symbolizes the conservative
wing in the ROC. He is a pragmatist and a romantic at one and the same time. His
chief idea is Russia as an Orthodox country, and chekists who have joined the church
are good Chekists.”

“He really loves
the Church more than he loves Christ, and this is dangerous.” If Shevkunov is
forced to make a choice, there is little question as to which side he’ll come
down on. Another churchman, Father Iosif Kiperman shares that view and sees
Shevkunov as part and parcel of a larger chekist project.

“The chekists from the very beginning
thought aobut building a Soviet church in order that parishioners would become
Soviet people. They wanted to leave the external form of the church as it was
but change everything inside.Tikhon
[Shevkunov] is one of these Soviet people” and he’s ready to realize this “last
idea” of the devil.

Staunton, December 30 – Coordination
among institutions at all levels is “the most important condition for the
normal work of bureaucrats” but “in contemporary Russia, things in this regard are
in worse shape than they were in the USSR,” according to Kirill Titayev and
Darya Dimke.

The two scholars from St. Petersburg’s
European University say that explains why things like the construction of a
playground with no toilets nearby or the opening of a park a kilometer from the
nearest bus stop now happen: there is no basis for coordination among the
various groups responsible (rbc.ru/opinions/society/22/12/2017/5a3cb8f29a79472fec2b439b).

“The
Soviet system of state administration had many minuses,” they write, but “it
had its own internal logic” and that logic was not as “authoritarian and
vertical as it is typically presented today.” On the one hand, every
institution was subordinate within a pyramid; but on the other, two
institutions – the soviets and the party structures – allowed them to
coordinate.

Had
those coordinating bodies not existed, “the system simply could not have worked
at all.” It would have collapsed. But the soviets and the party committees in
which all the key institutions were represented allowed the groups to talk to
each other, something made even more necessary and possible by the multiple
subordinations of many primary institutions.

“The
reforms of the 1990s expelled from this system all the mechanisms of horizontal
coordination,” the two scholars say. And as a result, “the new society which the
reformers built inherited the vertical nature of its predecessor but destroyed practically
all systems of horizontal coordination.”

That
means that “we live not in the Soviet Union but in an administrative reality
which would have seemed a nightmare to any Soviet bureaucracy because it lacks
practically all of the local mechanisms of coordination.” As a result,” we see playgrounds
in cities beyond the Arctic circle and police struggles against drunkenness in Muslim
regions with traditionally low levels of alcohol consumption.

“Having
destroyed ‘the diktat of party organs,’ the reforms did not think up any
mechanisms of horizontal coordination which could take the place of those which
had been destroyed. In the economy, this problem was more of less solved by
means of privatization.” But in state administration, a huge whole has been
left unfilled.

If
local governments were stronger and controlled more of their own resources,
this might not have mattered as much as it does; But there are few cities which
earn enough to pay their own pay; and to get money from Moscow, they have to
cede control to the center without any chance at coordination.

Consequently,
the two write, “for any successful reforms, the creation of mechanisms of
horizontal coordination and the weakening of vertical pressure are vitally
necessary. Otherwise w will remain living in a worsened version of the Soviet
Union.”

Staunton, December 30 – At the everyday
level, Vladimir Pastukhov says, it is unlikely that Russians lie more than
people in other countries do; but in the public sphere, the lie is not
criticized but rather encouraged,” making it “almost the norm of public
politics not only in the eyes of the authorities but in those of the population
as well.

There are many reasons for the official
“condescension toward lies,” the St. Antony’s College historian says, including
of course the attitudes of the Russian Orthodox Church.But the main explanations are to be found in
the fact that “Russians have always viewed themselves as a cultural minority”
forced to fight a stronger opponent (bbc.com/russian/features-42513156).

“In
Russia, a lie is viewed as a weapon of the weak against the strong,” Pastukhov
continues, “as a justified means of defense against overwhelming force.”The real problem [with them] is that Russians
are often happy that they are lying” and thus view “the lie as an alternative
truth.”

This
may be one of the reasons why the word “pravda” doesn’t correspond with “istina”
and why “in Russia it can be something which corresponds to reality and also
something which doesn’t correspond.”Indeed, the historian says, “the just lie in Russia is valued above the
unjust truth.”

“In
Russia, they lie with missionary-like ecstasy,” Pastukhov suggests.And that is the basis of hypocrisy among
Russians, “a manifestation of the feeling of incompleteness relative to the strong
of this world, a slavish habit which has roots going back to serfdom.”

And
it gets in the way of Russians adequately understanding their real relationship
to the outside world: “While constantly talking about the greatness of Russia,
many Russians in the depths of their souls do not believe in the ability of
their country to defend its independence without using lies.”

After
1991, the lie was mostly a matter for internal use in Russia, but in the last
few years, Pastukhov argues, it has spread to foreign affairs as well. “Certainly,
some of the personal qualities of Vladimir Putin made this possible,” as can be
seen when the lie returned in full force at the time of the sinking of the Kursk.

“The
unwillingness or inability of Putin to resolve the crisis by telling the truth
about what had happened led then to the first serious split of the post-Yeltsin
elite” and opened the way to the destruction of Russia’s independent media,
first electronic and more recently the print media as well.

Now, “the lie accompanies practically any Kremlin action,
be it war with terrorism or prominent court cases,” Pastukhov says. By the
beginning of Putin’s third term, “the level of lies in Russian public policy
had reached critical mass” and led to a shift from retail lying to organized
whole lying with trolls and so on.

“Present-day
Russia adopted the tactic of the Komintern,” a tactic which “consists in the creation
of artificial contradictions and the intensification of natural contradictions
between Western countries and also between political parties within each of the
Western countries in particular.”

The
Kremlin uses lies both offensively and defensively, Pastukhov says, and today
in essence “Russia does everything that it accuses the West of doing, from
unleashing a cold war to the preparation of ‘color revolutions.’”The Russian people know what is going on but
support their regime without “the slightest moral discomfort.”

Such
a situation when a society is caught up in a web of lies from top to bottom is
hardly unique to Russia now. “Something similar occurred in Russia at the end
of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.”
Indeed, “this is one of the truest signs of the unavoidability of a revolution which
will destroy this web of lying together with the entire old order.”

Churchill
supposedly said that “there is no anti-Semitism in England” because “we do not
consider ourselves more stupid than the Jews.” And lies will be driven out of
the public sphere in Russia only when “elites appear who do not suffer from a sense
of inferiority to the West or East and don’t therefore need the lie for salvation.”